Steve’s SCD Diet Journal

Co-Founder of SCD Lifestyle Steve Wright has finally broken down and started his path to intestinal healing. After many years of undiagnosed digestive warfare in his body, these series of weekly posts will take you through his experiences, thoughts, and struggles on the SCD diet. Check back and follow his progress:

Week 23 Summary

Wow, I’ve been extremely busy this week and this Journal entry is pretty late! Because of that I’m going to keep it short and sweet. Last week I had a very stable digestive week, possibly slightly improved from a BM stand point. I’ve been trying extremely hard to get at least a cup of goat’s milk yogurt each day and I think it has been really helping my stool quality.

I did add a few new variables to my diet last week. I added watercress to my diet and didn’t react to it. I couldn’t find any watercress by themselves instead I found a frozen vegetable mix that contained watercress. I made what is going to be a new staple in my diet… a quick and dirty stir fry. I browned 2lbs of ground meat and added the whole package of mixed veggies. I then added some red wine vinegar, a bit of honey and some spices (salt, pepper, cayenne pepper) to achieve a very nice sweet and hot flavor.

I also added some jalapeno peppers to the my diet. I started by using some fresh peppers de-seeded and cooked in a dish early last week and then later I found some pickled Jalapeno peppers that don’t have any extra ingredients. I used them in my quick and dirty stir fry above to add a bit of PoP! Just be careful with the Jalapeno’s, they can really inflame the digestive track if they aren’t used in moderation.

My allergies are still killing me and I’m having a hard time breathing through my nose but when I can breathe I can usually smell! At this point I really just wish I could breathe better (don’t get into see the allergist for another couple months).

SPICE OF LIFE RAMBLINGS

Over the last month I’ve attended several events in which I knew I would love a summer cocktail but wouldn’t be able to drink anything the host was providing. With the 4th of July holiday weekend approaching I figured I would share my current favorite SCD legal summer cocktail recipe. After trying several recipes I have to thank Carrie Floyd over at Culinate Kitchen for posting the Kimmy drink because it is by far my favorite. I put an extra spin on the original recipe and made a party sized batch so I will put those measurements in quotes. The prep time is a bit more than usual because of the mint syrup but it’s not as bad as the many summer cocktails that contain pounds of fresh fruit that need to be diced up. It has an awesome fresh taste that is somewhere between a gin and tonic and a mojito. The drink can also be made non-alcoholic by removing the gin and using extra club soda (non-flavored carbonated water).

Co-Founder of SCD Lifestyle Steve Wright has finally broken down and started his path to intestinal healing. After many years of undiagnosed digestive warfare in his body, these series of weekly posts will take you through his experiences, thoughts, and struggles on the SCD diet. Check back and follow his progress:

Week 22 Summary

Man I really hope these journals don’t get boring but honestly my digestion has been very stable lately. I am still not quite where I want to be, but usually I’m averaging a 3 or a 4 on the Bristol Stool chart. The reason I say I’m not quite there yet, is I’m still getting the occasional 2 and honestly I would rather be bouncing between a 4 and a 5 on the chart. In case anyone is wondering I do average about 1.5 BM’s a day (some days 1 others 2 hence 1.5). But overall it has been steady and relatively boring which is a good thing!

As I’ve noticed this trend it has sort of renewed my focus to push into more SCD legal foods. I really want to concentrate on adding foods and progressing through the remaining phases. Last week I started to make a concentrated effort to try new vegetables. As you know I’m sort of giving up on broccoli for now but I figured I would give its cousin cauliflower a shot.

I actually don’t know if I’ve ever ate just cauliflower, as far as I can remember its only been as part of mixed vegetables, but I really enjoyed the taste and it didn’t give me any digestion problems. I bought organic cauliflower heads and cut up the florets and steamed them. The first time I ate it I grated the florets down using a cheese grater to make it easier to digest and to simulate eating rice. The next couple times as I finished off my leftovers I skipped the grating idea cause it just takes to dang long!

The second item of the week that I gave a go with was green peas. For the peas I ended up buying organic frozen peas from Meijer. I bought two bags and put them both into a glass bowl and then put some about a cup of water in the bottom. I then put them in the microwave for 20 minutes on high. The came out what I would say is about medium cooked, soft but not mush. I put some sea salt on them and have been enjoying them for a couple days now without any problems. I would like to caution people to really pay attention to chewing your food and especially peas as they have a outer shell that really needs to be ground up as much as possible before swallowing.

Looking ahead next week I have my follow up appointment with the doc so I will have a full report of my Genova Stool test and my blood work. In the meantime I’m going to add the goats milk yogurt back in (its going on about 7 weeks since I last made some) to see if I can get rid of my random 2’s and get my average BM score up to the 4 – 5 range.

SPICE OF LIFE RAMBLINGS

I’m thinking as this blog evolves we need to start having some more food porn and recipes for people on the SCD diet. Now I know there are a ton of recipe sites out there but I want this section to focus on showing a newer cook that it is possible to make some amazing dishes even if you don’t know jack about being a real chef.

This week I got some frozen duck breasts from an avid hunter friend of mine and I wanted to make something special with it. In the past whenever I cooked duck breasts it was on a grill smothered in BBQ sauce. Now that I’m doing the SCD diet I can’t just go buy a bottle of HFCS BBQ sauce from the store and slather it on. So I did some searching and decided to make my own recipe.

Below was my gourmet meal of the week, it was good, but not Emril POW! good. I think this is because I messed up a few key areas. First I cooked the duck breasts too long, they should only be cooked to medium, but some of mine ended up being well done and real tuff. Second I boiled my sauce too long and overflowed it as well so I don’t think I used enough raspberries. Below is my adjusted work in progress attempt at raspberry duck.

Duck Breasts

8 duck breasts

2 tablespoons of sea salt

Red Pepper flakes to taste (1 Tbl is a good start)

1 tablespoon coconut oil

Heat a large pan to medium heat while washing and drying the duck breasts. Coat the duck breasts with sea salt and red pepper flakes. Let the duck breasts stand for 15 min before cooking in the mean time put the coconut oil in the pan. After the oil is melted put the breasts in and cook on each side for 3 to 4 minutes each depending on thickness of breast. The goal here is to get them medium or medium rare.

Raspberry Sauce

1/2 cup dry red wine

1/4 cup honey

8 oz raspberry

2 teaspoon of Cinnamon

SCD Legal Raspberry Duck

In a small pot combine the wine, honey, cinnamon and raspberries. Bring the mixture to a rolling boil for about a minute or two. Then reduce heat and simmer for another 10 minutes (if berries haven’t broken down you may need to mash them to break them up). Then pour the sauce through a metal mesh stainer into a food container (use glass if possible).

If you want to get all fancy, steam and grate some cauliflower as a base, slice your duck breast and then drizzle with sauce!

Official warning: this is a work in progress, like I said, it was good but didn’t quite POP like I wanted it to….Any real chiefs out there want to weigh in on my mistakes?

Co-Founder of SCD Lifestyle Steve Wright has finally broken down and started his path to intestinal healing. After many years of undiagnosed digestive warfare in his body, these series of weekly posts will take you through his experiences, thoughts, and struggles on the SCD diet. Check back and follow his progress:

Week 21 Summary

Another week down and another camping trip to fill you in about. But first I should mention that I tried broccoli again and this time I’m defiantly putting broccoli in the suspect category. It wasn’t that it caused me horrible symptoms but I did notice a higher incidence of gas and my stomach made a bunch of noise after a couple meals that included it. So until further notice broccoli is on my caution list and won’t be tried purposely for awhile. Instead, I’m going to move on and start breaking into more vegetables in phase 3. I’m still keeping fruit to a minimum until I get my stool test results back (Next week!).

I ran out of the anti-fungals I’ve been taking last week. After my doctor’s appointment next week I will have a better idea of what or if I’m still dealing with bad bacteria/yeast. I have noticed that since doing the round of anti-fungals my oral thrush is basically gone (encouraging). But yeast problems are notoriously hard to get rid of so I’m not holding my breath. My BM’s stayed consistent last week rotating between 3’s and 4’s with the occasional 2. I think it would good to note that I haven’t been eating any yogurt for 3 weeks now. I plan to start again soon.

I am continuing to build my iodine dosage and haven’t had any side effects yet. I’m currently taking 37.5 mg a day and next week I will bump it up to 50mg. I plan on staying at that dosage for 3 full months and then dropping back down to a maintenance dosage. I did do another zinc tally taste test and got some pretty strong taste sensations around the 10 second mark. Much improved response after last week. Unfortunately my allergies have got my nose so plugged lately that I can hardly breathe let alone smell. However as dumb as it sounds I still get a big ol smile on my face when I randomly catch a wiff of some summer rain, a camp fire, or some fresh cut grass.

SCD CAMPING IS NATURAL

So last weekend I went on a guys weekend that included some golfing, fishing and camping. It was great to get out of dodge and even though it would have been nice to catch more fish, any day on the water is better than a day at the office. I do have to say camping SCD style is getting easier and easier. It is natural to cook burgers on a grill, just make sure you pack your SCD legal cheese (don’t forget the Eden’s mustard if you can tolerate it!).

With all the natural foods that are allowed on the SCD diet camping can really is a breeze, this weekend I was stocked up with my standard camping diet of avocados, bananas and almond flour muffins but also I brought along a huge food container of pulled pork, cooked carrots and sautéed spinach. I left the Lara bars home this weekend and while I do confess to eating my burger on non-cooked lettuce everything else was cooked and compliant to Phase 3.

Camping on the SCD diet, especially one that is not restricted by the phases, would be cake (almond flour that is). I mean think of all the amazing SCD legal foods that are highly packable and taste great like raw carrots, raisins, any other fresh fruits, pre-washed and chopped raw veggies. As far as meats go, pack the cooler with pre-cooked meats (cut up pork, chicken, etc) or just cook on the grill daily (burgers, chicken breasts, etc). Honestly, it’s like it is NATURAL to eat SCD style while camping. Many of my friends basically did this weekend other than their burger buns.

Now that I am thinking about it, it makes perfect sense, the SCD diet is extremely close to the Primal Diet. My thinking is camping brings us as close as possible to the way our hunter gather ancestors lived. It would only be logical then, that the easiest foods to eat and cook while camping would be the same ones that our ancestors did. Never have I seen someone making bread in a campground. Oh and it’s not really camping if you’re in an air conditioned trailer with TV, go spend the weekend in a tent and appreciate nature!

SPICE OF LIFE RAMBLINGS

This past week I was posed with a new SCD diet problem. I signed up to go on a fishing weekend knowing that at least 1 meal (usually as many as possible) would be fish and everyone I know loves to fry walleye in the golden standard Drakes breading mix. Drakes of course, is NOT SCD legal, so if I was going to make this part of the trip as un-socially awkward as possible, I needed to find a suitable replacement.

I did some research and found plenty of homemade fish breading mixtures, but basically every single one of them included non-legal SCD flour. So I decided it was time to invent my own. Without further ado:

Wright’s Walleye Breading

3 cups almond flour

2 tablespoons paprika

2 tablespoons sea salt

2 tablespoons fresh ground pepper

2 tablespoon garlic powder

1 tablespoon cayenne pepper

Make sure all your spices are SCD legal, make your own garlic powder if needed. Just combine them in a ziplock bag and shake. You can then either bread the fish when the fillets are slightly moist or beat a few eggs up and dip them in the egg and then coat them with the almond flour mixture. However, I would recommend the first approach… I tried both and once the almond flour got a bit of moister from the egg my mix was ruined. This breading would probably taste great on chicken or turkey and I plan on trying it soon.

So how did the mixture stack up against the current walleye breading champion? I loved it and most of my friends had nothing but thumbs up (all non-SCD’ers). The jury is out on who is currently wearing the Walleye Breading Belt but I can tell you that weren’t any wasted fish with my breading on it. The almond flour provides a very light crust (doesn’t retain the cooking oil) with a nice texture and my mix of spices has a decent kick of heat to spice it up a bit.

Let me know if you try the breading I would love to hear some more feedback! Anyone else pan-frying or deep-frying fish out there?

Co-Founder of SCD Lifestyle Steve Wright has finally broken down and started his path to intestinal healing. After many years of undiagnosed digestive warfare in his body, these series of weekly posts will take you through his experiences, thoughts, and struggles on the SCD diet. Check back and follow his progress:

Week 20 Summary

Okay so my birthday wasn’t last week its actually today, but I did celebrate it with my family this past weekend. My family overall has been skeptical but supportive of my Specific Carbohydrate Diet experience. In our family, family meals are of high importance.

Food is a medium through which we can gather to bond, with many meals stretching over 2 hours of table time. So in the beginning of this diet I did seem to hurt my mom’s feelings because I was excluding myself from the amount of love and time she was putting in kitchen.

Now that I’ve been doing this diet for 5 months and I have added back a pretty decent selection of foods, it has been much easier on her. Since the beginning she has been making every effort to try and cook special meals that I can eat and the whole family enjoys. It was always just a bit to hard in the first 3 months or so as I was eating a mixed pureed diet that was pretty basic.

Not anymore, for my birthday this weekend my mom made a wonderful SCD legal breakfast filled with scrambled eggs, sugar free bacon and fruit followed with the Carrot Cake recipe from BTVC. There was an enormous amount of food on the table and it was cleaned by all (Yes in my experience “normal” people usually prefer SCD food). The carrot cake was extremely moist and delicious, so much so that I don’t think anyone even missed the standard American diet traditions of frosting and ice cream (it does taste even better loaded in butter!).

My diet was steady all week last week, I started taking my supplements again. I had minimal gas and my BM’s were a mixture of 3’s and 4’s, I would say that’s a pretty solid sign that I’m still in need of some supplemental helpers. After being urged by my doctor and doing some of my own research, I started Iodine supplementation last week. I’m going to start slow at 12.5mg a day and build up to a daily dosage of 50mg for something like 4 to 6 months. The research on Iodine is so absurdly beneficial without any downsides that I’m now urging anyone who will listen to either get tested or talk to some about starting to supplement!

SMELLING UPDATE

So I feel like I’ve made some significant progress in my ability to smell. But in the past week I’ve seen some regression in my smelling abilities. I’m guessing it has is related to my horrible allergies right now, and I don’t get into see the allergist till November. Today when I performed my weekly zinc tally taste test I was surprised to find that I performed worse than last week. Which means I’m going to continue to supplementing with zinc and I need to go find some copper to make sure i don’t deplete my copper levels.

That being said I do want to make it clear that on most days I’m still smelling significantly better than I was 3 months ago and I’ve made a 180 degree change from 6 months ago. I don’t think I can contribute it to one specific action I’ve taken but I do feel strongly that a couple specific changes I’ve made have directly influenced my improvement. I think the biggest improvements have come from following the SCD Diet, Fish oil, Vitamin D3, Netti pot and Zinc.

SPICE OF LIFE RAMBLINGS

As I’ve learned more and more about cooking natural foods and using high quality sauces and spices my eyes have really been opened into a whole new world of flavors and fun. Before the SCD diet I think I used 4 sauces (hot sauces, sugar laden BBQ sauce, store bought Italian dressing and salsa full of preservatives) and I would have argued with anyone how good they were on any dish. I was content in my little world of dressings, thinking I knew flavor…ha not so much.

It is not that I look down on people who still use these sauces as they can be delicious, it is just the opposite… I feel bad for them. The fact that the 95% of people probably use store bought sauces for all their meals really makes me sad as they are missing out on a whole world of amazingness (is that a word?) My paradigm is rapidly changing from one in which I wish I could be apart of their world (SAD diet) to one in which I feel pity on the fact that they don’t know what they are missing.

Anyways, enough ramblings, I did want to share my current spice mixture that I’ve been playing around with on everything from baked pork tenderloins to grilled chicken breasts. It consists of a 4 main spices: paprika, cayenne pepper, cinnamon and ginger. Now, sometimes I put other spices in there such as salt, garlic, and pepper, but the main 4 are constants. I’m not ready to give any specific ratio yet as I haven’t perfected it, but I will say keep the cinnamon and cayenne pepper at about a 1:2 ratio and the keep the ginger at about the same amount of cayenne, then load on the paprika. This will get a very decent spicy yet sweet mixture that has been receiving rave reviews from my family and friends. I use it mainly as a dry rub and it really does work better when everything is measured out rather than winged because it’s easy to overdo any one of the these spices.

Does anyone else have any secret spice rub mixtures they’d like to share?

Co-Founder of SCD Lifestyle Steve Wright has finally broken down and started his path to intestinal healing. After many years of undiagnosed digestive warfare in his body, these series of weekly posts will take you through his experiences, thoughts, and struggles on the SCD diet. Check back and follow his progress:

Week 19 Summary

Last week was an adventure, in more ways than one…stool tests, no pills and camping, Oh My! I stopped taking any pills last Sunday in order to properly perform the Genova Diagnostics Stool Test. Pretty much all the digestive helpers I take would skew the test results and even though I could have continued taking my multivitamin, fish oil and vitamin D3 I figured why not give my whole body a week’s rest. I’m a firm believer in only taking the essentials and always keeping your body on its toes so I figured my body wouldn’t mind a bit of a break. I can’t wait for the day when I’m down to a few simple vitamins a day instead of the mountains of pills I take each week while I’m healing!

Because you have to be supplement free for 3 days prior to taking the test and then the test lasts 3 days I figured I would just stretch it out until I was back into my normal routine on Tuesday. I’ve been on many of these supplements for over 4 months and I had a decent amount of anxiety wrapped up in quitting them. I honestly thought that 8 days without probiotics and digestive enzymes and I might be back where I started last year. Lucky for me that wasn’t the case.

The first couple days of the week I had quite a bit of noise and movement in my stomach after eating, none of which were painful, only slightly annoying. As the days dragged on the noise and digestive uneasiness subsided by about day 5. I really didn’t have any other big problems, my BM’s all week were about 80% 2’s. Which isn’t exactly ideal but was way better than 1’s or 7’s I thought I was in for. I was never constipated and had at least one bowel movement each day and couple of doubles (Score!). I did only eat yogurt for the first 3 of those days as I really didn’t want there to be anything that could mess up this test.

Camping On the SCD Diet

Last weekend was Memorial weekend here in the United States and first off I would like to thank all the current members of our armed services and all of our veterans. Without their sacrifices none of us would even have the time to work on our “health” as we would be most likely too busy dodging bullets or working in the fields.

In honor of the fact that I got a 3 day weekend, some friends and I went camping for the weekend. For the record none of these friends are fellow SCD’ers and several I just meet recently. In order for it to be a successful SCD weekend for me, especially on zero digestive helpers, I knew I was going to have to plan everything to a T. In fact, after it was all said and done it was relatively easy and I had no problems at all having enough food and keeping my food separate from everyone else’s (Brought my own cooler).

I prepared a bunch of food last Thursday including chopped chicken breasts and cooked carrots for me to eat and I chopped up some lettuce and some other fresh veggies for the rest of the group that I knew I could fall back on if needed (SCD legal just more advanced in their raw form). I also pulled out a batch of almond muffins from my freezer that I made last week. I stocked up on plenty of bananas and avocados. Lastly, I picked up a couple Lara bars if anything were to go horribly wrong, but it didn’t and I ended up bringing them back home with me.

For breakfast each day I ate 2 muffins and a banana, for lunch I ate my chopped grilled chicken cold with some cold carrots. For dinner each night I ate burgers which everyone else at as well but I was using my own grill and I did the cooking so I controlled all the variables. I did use some chopped up lettuce as “buns” for my burgers and used some of my Eden’s mustard for flavoring. I know I’m not supposed to have uncooked lettuce just yet (its a more advanced food in the phases) but I gambled a bit in the name of camping and burgers. I also ate raw avocado whenever I was hungry in between meals, sometimes in the morning or afternoon.

Digestively I fared pretty well, I continued having my one to two bowel movements each day with mixture of 2 and 3 on the quality scale all weekend. My stomach was never upset and I was able to enjoy the time I had at the beach and being outdoors. Camping while on the SCD diet ended up being much easier for me than several other social gatherings I have participated in (bachelor parties, family parties, bars etc…) and I would highly recommend people who are doing the SCD diet to look into it for a summer vacations.

The content of our Website and any products sold from this Website is intended for informational purposes only and is not written by medical professionals. Readers should not act upon any information provided on this Website without seeking advice from a licensed physician. This Website is not intended to create a physician-patient relationship between us and any user of this Website.